Ural Maru

Ural Maru (うらる丸) was a 6,374-ton Japanese transport ship during World War II. Ural Maru was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of some 2,000 lives on September 27, 1944 by the American submarine USS Flasher. The ship was carrying Japanese wounded, nurses and a number of "comfort women". In addition there were ten unusual passengers - Indian National Army cadets of Indian origin on their way to Japan for military training. Only one of them, Bishan Singh, died in the sinking. One of the survivors, Ramesh S. Benegal, went on to become an officer in the Indian Air Force in independent India and retired as an Air Commodore. He provides a first-person account of the sinking of the Ural Maru in his book "Burma to Japan with Azad Hind - A War Memoir". The complement of passengers is also based on his account. Some accounts refer to the ship as carrying Allied (Indian) POWs but do not seem to be true because otherwise the INA cadets would have noticed. In response to the Australian protest against the sinking of the hospital ship Centaur, the Japanese had lodged a counter-protest about the sinking of a number of their own hospital ships, the Ural Maru being one of them. In the case of this ship, at least, their account appears to be true.

The INA cadets on board the Ural Maru were: (Malayans of Indian parentage) Narayanan, Bishan Singh, Navaratnam, Ghosh, Robert Prosper, Ranjit Das; (Burmese of Indian parentage) Benegal, Gandhi Das, Dutta, Bimol Deb.

References

• Maritime Disasters of World War II. "Burma to Japan with Azad Hind - A War Memoir" (Lancer Publishers, New Delhi, copyright Meera R. Benegal, 2009).

See also

List of battles and other violent events by death toll